WORKERS HAVE reacted with anger to huge multinational Diageo's announcement of the closure of the Guinness brewery in Park Royal in Brent, north west London. The company plans to axe 90 jobs in the 70 year old plant in London, transferring this work to St James's Gate, Ireland. According to one union rep, \"For a number of years management have used the threat of closing either Park Royal or St James's Gate as a way of pushing through cuts and rationalisation in both plants. We gave concession after concession. We were told we had to 'modernise' and we did, but it just meant more work and now they do this. Park Royal was set up by Guinness in the 1930s to avoid paying import tax
FIRE BRIGADES Union (FBU) members in Tower Hamlets, east London, are balloting for industrial action over a scheme designed to cover up for cuts in the ambulance service by getting firefighters effectively to do two jobs. Karl Haider, a local FBU union official, told Socialist Worker what's at stake:
SIGNALLING, maintenance and station staff working for the company that runs the entire rail infrastructure network are to ballot for strikes which could bring the first national rail stoppage for ten years. The 7,000 members of the RMT union on Network Rail were due to begin receiving ballot papers this week for action over pay, pensions and travel facilities. Network Rail has offered a pay rise of just 3 percent-the lowest pay offer in the rail industry.
THE MAGNIFICENT all-out strike of 4,500 nursery nurses across Scotland is still going strong in its eighth week. The strikers, members of the Unison union, are fighting for a decent national pay deal from COSLA, the Labour-dominated local employers. Scottish nursery nurses voted to continue their action at a meeting on Tuesday of this week.
Nursery nurses in Scotland are continuing their all-out strike to win a decent national pay rise and regrading. The 4,500 strikers are members of the Unison union and have been out for almost seven weeks. On Tuesday they marched through Ayr.
IN BIRMINGHAM, thousands of copies of the \"Bliar! Bliar! Iraq's on fire\" Respect postcard were given out in the city centre. \"The response was brilliant. People took handfuls of the cards away with them and left their names to get involved in Respect,\" says Ian, who helped with the stall. It was also quite moving that so many people came up who had relatives in Iraq or who had been to Iraq. They were furious and just wanted to get the troops out now.\"
In Fallujah's mass cemetery the Jassim family weep for their dead son, one of hundreds of victims of the US massacre...
"I WANT to express our very, very strong support for the new united campaign against the BNP. We are encouraging our activists to get involved." So said Brendan Barber, head of the TUC, at the press launch of Unite Against Fascism in London on Tuesday.
WORKERS AT the Health and Safety Executive, members of the PCS and Prospect unions, are continuing our campaign for a fair pay rise for all, with a work to rule and withdrawal of good will. This follows our successful one-day strike on 29 March.
THE STRIKE by around 100,000 civil servants in the PCS union on Tuesday and Wednesday showed the angry mood about low pay. Workers in the biggest civil servant employer the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the prisons service struck for both days. Colleagues in the Office for National Statistics struck on Tuesday. DWP workers struck previously in February, while the prison service struck in January.
PROFIT RULES, and service can go to the dogs-more than 1,600 post offices face closure after a review of the £150 million a year subsidy that sustains the rural network. A fifth of rural post offices may shut as a result of the review by the government and its regulator, Postcomm. The subsidy is due to run out at the beginning of 2006.
